Daum's boys: Schools and the Republic of Letters in early modern Germany

By Alan Ross

This highly original book is the first in-depth study of a footsoldier of the seventeenth-century German Republic of Letters. Its subject, the polymath and schoolteacher Christian Daum, is today completely forgotten, yet left behind one of the largest private archives of any early modern European scholar. On the basis of this unique source, this book portrays schools as focal points of a whole world of Lutheran learning outside of universities and courts, as places not just of education but of intense scholarship, and examines their significance for German culture.


Multi-confessional Germany was different from Catholic France and Protestant England in that its network of small cities fostered educational and cultural competition and made possible a much larger and socially open Republic. This book allows us for the first time to understand how the Republic of Letters was constructed from below and how it was possible for individuals from relatively humble backgrounds and occupations to be at the centre of European intellectual life.

This book is aimed at other specialists as well as postgraduate students in the fields of cultural and social history, and can also serve as an introduction to recent European literature on early modern scholarship for undergraduate students.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784991715

Alan Ross

ALAN ROSS is a freelance writer, musician, and former editor for Professional Team Publications, Athlon Sports Communications, and Walnut Grove Press. A regular contributor to American Profile magazine and NFL.com, he lives in Bisbee, Arizona.

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Daum’s boys

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Studies in Early Modern European History

This series aims to publish challenging and innovative research in all areas of early modern Continental history. The editors are committed to encouraging work that engages with current historiographical debates, adopts an interdisciplinary approach or makes an original contribution to our understanding of the period.

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Joseph Bergin, William G. Naphy, Penny Roberts, Paolo Rossi

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Daum’s boys

Schools and the Republic of Letters in early modern Germany

Alan S. Ross

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Alan S. Ross 2015

The right of Alan S. Ross to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 9089 9 hardback

First published 2015

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

Printed in Great Britain

by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

This book is dedicated to my parents, Shelley and Douglas, and my brother Huw

Even in the villages, one finds teachers of Greek and Latin. There is no small town that does not have a satisfactory library of its own, and almost everywhere one can name several men worthy of note for their talents and scholarship.

Madame de Staël on Saxony, De l’Allemagne (London, 1813)

‘On trouve jusque dans les villages des professeurs de grec et de latin. Il n’y a pas de petite ville qui ne renferme une assez bonne bibliothèque, et presque partout on peut citer quelques hommes recommandables par leurs talents et par leurs connaissances.’

Contents

List of figures

List of maps

Acknowledgements

Note on currencies and translations

Introduction

1 ‘A veritable gem’: urban culture, authority and education in early modern Zwickau

2 The finished scholar: convincing oneself and convincing others

3 The virtues of diversity: pedagogical innovation and contested curricula

4 The pupils: educational strategies and social mobility

5 Violent aspirations: pupils’ transgression and the spectre of university

6 Networks, patronage and exploitation: correspondence and the next generation of scholars

Conclusion: civic communities, humanist education and the ‘Age of Enlightenment’

Appendices

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1 The Epicedia for Erasmus Richter. RSB Zwickau.

2 Daum’s official portrait. Kunstsammlungen Zwickau.

3 Plateanus’ ABC table. RSB Zwickau.

4 The Zwickau Latin school in the early nineteenth century. RSB Zwickau.

5 The Priesterhäuser. Photo taken by the author.

6 Graffiti, attic room, Priesterhäuser. Photo taken by the author.

7 Gallery of rectors, Zwikau Latin school, 1: Stephan Roth, rector of the school 1517–20. Kunstsammlungen Zwickau.

8 Gallery of rectors, Zwikau Latin school, 2: Peter Hornig, rector of the school 1608–17. Kunstsammlungen Zwickau.

9 Gallery of rectors, Zwikau Latin school, 3: Georg Andreas Vinhold, rector of the school 1699–1739. Kunstsammlungen Zwickau.

10 Gallery of rectors, Zwikau Latin school, 4: Christian Clodius, rector of the school 1740–88. Kunstsammlungen Zwickau.

11 Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome in His Study. Kupferstichkabinett Berlin.

12 Martin Luther, Der Kleine Catechimus. RSB Zwickau.

13 Study in the co-rector’s house. Photo taken by the author, 2005.

14 Rector Johannes Zechendorf in his coffin, 1662. Kunstsammlungen Zwickau.

15 Portrait of Daum on the frontispiece of his funeral sermon. RSB Zwickau.

16 Caspar von Barth. Kunstsammlungen Zwickau.

17 Letters Daum received. Figure compiled by the author from information contained in Mahnke, Epistolae ad Daumium.

18 Daum’s preliminary sketch for his funeral sermon, window closed. RSB Zwickau.

19 Daum’s preliminary sketch for his funeral sermon, window open. RSB Zwickau.

20 Total number of pupils, 1616–1834. Rights held by the author.

21 Places from which pupils were drawn. Rights held by the author.

22 Three very different school careers. Rights held by the author.

23 Sizes of forms. Rights held by the author.

24 Professions of fathers of Firmani. Rights held by the author.

25 The challenge to a duel issued by three schoolboys to a fellow pupil. RSB Zwickau.

26 Joachim Feller. Kunstsammlungen Zwickau.

Maps

1 Albertine Saxony in the second half of the seventeenth century (Electorate of Saxony and dependent [secundogeniture] territories).

2 Locations of teacher-scholars among Daum’s correspondents. Figure compiled by the author from information contained in Mahnke, Epistolae ad Daumium.

3 Locations of teacher-scholars among Daum’s correspondents, Middle German area. Figure compiled by the author from information contained in Mahnke, Epistolae ad Daumium.

4 Zwickau in the seventeenth century.

Acknowledgements

Throughout the drawn-out process of writing and rewriting this volume, I have become increasingly aware of how important good-natured rivalries and friendship are in the twenty-first-century Republic of Letters. While I wish to thank anyone who ever took the trouble to think about my project, some stand out as having provided crucial help at important crossroads. Robert Frost first suggested that I might want to write about early modern childhood and youth. The late Lindsey Hughes and Conrad Russell provided encouragement at a crucial crossroads. Lyndal Roper has seen the project through from the beginning to its completion (no mean feat!), guiding me through my archival work, rigorously testing my arguments and providing constant professional help and advice. Robert Evans has been straight with me when I was going in the wrong direction, open enough to let me investigate untrodden paths. Howard Hotson showed me how vital the understanding of seventeenth-century pedagogical thought was for this project and offered on-going encouragement.

Helen Watanabe O’Kelly and Joachim Whaley examined the thesis this book is based on and offered much-appreciated advice. I have learnt much from George Rousseau’s and Nick Stargardt’s expertise in the history of childhood and children, and Laurence Brockliss’ unrivalled familiarity with the early modern Republic of Letters. Robin Briggs and Judith Pollmann have all broadened my mind in different ways. Jan Hendrik Clausen, Marion Deschamp, Kat Hill, Jo Lawson, Daniel Morgan, William O’Reilly, Roland Pietsch and Helen Roche have provided invaluable comments on sections of this book, and I am extremely grateful to them for this. Stephen Forrest, Clemens Frotscher, Miriam Ronzoni, Christian Schemmel and Karin Tikkanen all offered help and advice. Walter Häuschen hosted me while I was writing up the project. Invaluable coffee/discussion time was spent with Daniel Laqua and Tomasz Gromelski. In Poland, Mariusz Markiewicz, Filip Wolan´ski and Jan Harasimowicz were unrivalled hosts and colleagues. In Göttingen, Rebekka Habermas took great interest in my project and offered much-appreciated advice, while in Geneva Philip Benedict first suggested using quantitative methods for my research.

In Zwickau, the staff of the Ratsschulbibliothek made me feel welcome from the first minute. The unrivalled expertise on Christian Daum of its director, Dr Lutz Mahnke, has informed every chapter of this book. Upstairs, the staff of the Stadtarchiv tirelessly photocopied documents and sifted through catalogues. The staff of the Städtische Kunstsammlungen were of constant help in hunting down images. Special thanks are due to Christof Kühnel, who searched through the parish registers of St Mary’s and St Catherine’s in the archives of the Nicolaigemeinde on my behalf. Wilfried Stoye allowed me to take photographs in the Priesterhäuser Museum; Norbert Oelsner and Matthias Fleischhauer generously shared information on the archaeological excavations and the restoration process of these unique buildings.

Several institutions and funding bodies have made this book possible. I would like to thank Hertford College, Oxford, for awarding me the Mary Starun Senior Scholarship; the Wingate Foundation; the trustees of the Scatcherd European and the Roy Foster Memorial Scholarships; the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the DAAD; the Europaeum; the Institute for Historical Research; the Royal Historical Society; the Klassikstiftung Weimar; and the Humboldt Foundation for their generous support. I would also like to thank Hertford, Mansfield and Somerville Colleges in Oxford; the Jagiellonian University, Cracow; Göttingen University; the Graduate Institute of International Studies and the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation, Geneva; Potsdam University; Fitzwilliam College and the Faculty of History at Cambridge University; and the Faculty of History at Humboldt University, Berlin (Peter Burschel), for hosting me during various stages of my research. Administrative and library staff at Hertford College, the Oxford University International Office, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung in Berlin have all gone way beyond the call of duty to help.

Parts of chapters 4 and 5 have appeared as ‘Pupils’ choices and social mobility after the Thirty Years’ War: a quantitative study’, The Historical Journal 57.2 (2014), reprinted with permission, ‘Learning by wrong-doing: aspiration and transgression among German pupils after the Thirty Years’ War’, Social History 40.2 (2015).

In putting up with me during the last few years, my friends and family have done more than I have to get this project finished. In Berlin and Potsdam, Thomas and Sabine and Kolya, Alexa and Achim, Lisa, Moritz, Matze, Clara, Katharina, Jan, Patrick and Florian have all been there for me when I needed them, and I won’t forget! Bauchmiel, Filip, Kasia, Kora, Maciek, Madzia (of course), Marcin, Omid, Piotrek, Rafał and Wojtek were great friends to me in Cracow and Poznan, while Alicja, Ayelet, Cincio, Corrado, Giovanna, Grace, Jared, Jon, Kyoko and the Bluegrass folks have made life in the UK often really great. Marion Deschamp has offered endless support and has been my sounding board. My family have done so much to help in all kinds of ways, and I have no idea how I could ever repay them.

Note on currencies and translations

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Introduction

On 12 September 1669, Gottfried Richter, a lawyer in the small Saxon town of Lichtenstein, sent a delicate request to Christian Daum, the rector of the Latin school of close-by Zwickau. Richter’s father had died the night before, and, as it befitted a judge, his passing needed to be commemorated in print in the form of a collection of Latin Epicedia, stylised death-poems written by those close to him. Richter had already arranged for 100 copies to be printed, but there was one problem: he did not think himself fit to write a Latin poem – could Daum, ‘whose skilful poetry is widely known’, write one in his name? And would he be so kind as to destroy his letter and to keep this little secret to himself?¹ Daum obliged (but did not destroy the correspondence!), and shortly afterwards the poem was published (in Richter’s name, of course) as part of a collection of Epicedia at Samuel Ebel’s small printer’s workshop in Zwickau (Figure 1).²

Image:fig_1 is missing

Figure 1 The Epicedia for Erasmus Richter, which contained the poem ghostwritten by Daum in the name of the deceased judge’s son, Gottfried. The citizenry’s constant demand for publications to mark weddings, funerals, baptisms and similar occasions brought Latin schoolteachers into regular contact with the urban elite.

Exchanges like these illustrate how much learned culture – that is, the appropriation of the languages and culture of the classical world in the humanist tradition – mattered in the life of the early modern German town, and the extent to which it permeated the fabric of civic communities.³ ‘Learning’ mattered to the burghers of seventeenth-century towns on a day-to-day basis, be it in the shape of their own humanist education or in that of contacts with men who possessed this precious commodity.

In the last three decades, intellectual and cultural historians have followed the lead of constitutional historians who have challenged the long-held view that territorial fragmentation made the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation fundamentally flawed and ‘backward’ as a political entity in comparison to more centralised European regions such as England or France.⁴ On the contrary, the plethora of small centres of knowledge production made the Holy Roman Empire a cultural environment of great vitality and diversity.⁵ The wide distribution of cultural activity across the Empire’s territories was possible because the Holy Roman Empire was home to some of the most densely urbanised regions in Europe. In the majority of German towns, access to learned culture was provided not through universities, academies or princely courts, but through Latin schools, the German equivalent to English grammar schools. If we want to understand the vibrancy of German scholarly culture in the decades after the Thirty Years War, we need to take a close look at these schools.⁶ For Latin schools were, essentially, responsible for two of the defining characteristics of scholarly culture in early modern Germany: first, the easy integration of boys from non-learned backgrounds into the Republic of Letters, and second, the unbroken emphasis on the study of ancient languages and culture well into the nineteenth century.

It is not the school as a mere institution, though, that needs examining, but the school as a scholarly and cultural habitat. Schools mattered immensely in the early modern German town. They were the town’s past, in that they housed libraries and collections of artefacts. They were their future, in that the powerful and the not-so-powerful sent their children there. They were the theatre and concert hall, in that plays were written and staged here and schoolboy choirs sang in church on Sundays and on holidays. They connected the town to far-away intellectual centres through the teachers’ connections and the pupils who went on to university and, thereby, added considerably to the profoundly decentralised character German scholarship had in comparison to that of England or France.

Latin schools assumed their scholarly and cultural role in German cities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when a large number of schools formerly run by monasteries and church chapters came under the control of town councils. Having in most Lutheran territories by and large withstood intrusions by territorial government and consistories during and after the Reformation, local decision-making processes were gradually eroded in the early nineteenth century during the administrative reforms that saw the introduction of obligatory schooling and the establishment of ministries of education across Germany. In effect, the role Lutheran Latin schools played in German scholarship and civic culture underwent remarkably little change over a 400-year period.⁷

This book investigates the multifaceted nature of the school, not through an institutional case study in the traditional sense, but through the personal papers of a teacher and scholar. When the above-mentioned Christian Daum died aged seventy-five in 1687, he left to his home-town what is now one of the largest extant private libraries and collections of personal papers of any seventeenth-century German scholar. As he specified in his will, he did so specifically so that ‘his memory might be preserved in eternity’.⁸ To no avail: his name has not become part of the canon of the history of scholarship, as this highly competent philologist evidently hoped.⁹ Yet, as a teacher and later rector at an important Latin school, Daum was not only a scholar, but also responsible for transmitting a scholar’s mores and skills to the next generation. Through his papers, we get to see an early modern school the way it was seen at the time: an institution and a building, for sure, but also the home and work-space of established scholars, the rearing ground for future ones and, in its totality, the centre of scholarly activity of most small and mid-sized German towns.

Especially for its small-town practitioners, scholarship was about building networks. Scholars needed to acquire and maintain specific, technical knowledge, but, just as importantly, becoming a scholar was about communication. The exceptional status that men of learning claimed for themselves needed to be expressed and defended both in relation to a scholar’s peers and to the communities and institutions that supported them. This study is, more than anything else, about how the lifelong conversation developed that connected an early modern scholar both to his peers and to the groups and institutions that provided for his upkeep.

This book investigates two aspects of this conversation in detail: first, how within the decentralised structure of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, schools were the focal point of a whole world of scholarship outside universities and courts (Chapters 1 to 3); second, how pupils became immersed at school within a culture that had its own markers of distinction, allowing scholars both to recognise each other and distinguish them from non-‘learned’ men (Chapters 4 to 6).

Schools as ‘knowledge places’

There can be no doubt that, in the 300 years between the upheavals of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the widespread introduction of obligatory schooling during the so-called Age of Enlightenment, learning and education became directly relevant to more Europeans than during any previous period. Both literacy and training in the culture and languages of the ancients increased to such an extent that historians have spoken of an ‘educational revolution’ in the seventeenth century or have called the eighteenth the ‘pedagogical century’.¹⁰ Such change was, however, far from evenly distributed across the continent.¹¹ In the Holy Roman Empire, a greater number of educational establishments existed than in any other European region, Catholic, Protestant and Calvinist institutions often operating in direct proximity to each other. Schooling became a fiercely contested battleground on which the confessions competed with each other over the attention of the ever-important next generation of the faithful.¹²

Historians have explored Catholic preparatory education – the school curricula of which were geared to preparing pupils for university – to a greater extent than Lutheran and Calvinist schooling because of the on-going fascination with Jesuit education, both because its teaching plan (the Ratio Studiorum) was unique in being distributed across the world of Catholic renewal, and because of the threat Protestants perceived Jesuit academies and their seemingly centralised organisation to be. Jesuit academies certainly played an important role in European culture since, like the Lutheran schools this book concentrates on, they harboured established scholars.¹³ Yet in many ways, Jesuit academies were very different from other European preparatory schools. While not as aloof from their surroundings as Durkheim famously suggested,¹⁴ the centralised structure of Jesuit administration and a streamlined teaching programme did make them somewhat less responsive to local demands than the majority of European schools, which were locally funded and run by councils or local church chapters.¹⁵ The role the much more common civic schools played within the cultural and scholarly life of early modern Germany, particularly in relation to universities, still awaits a synthetic account. Before such an account can be written successfully, however, more studies of individual institutions are needed.

To the Lutheran reformers, education was crucial in ensuring the survival of their ideas into the next generation. If they wanted to consolidate the Reformation, they had to reach the children. Rather than impeding the progress of humanism, as it has sometimes been claimed,¹⁶ the Lutheran Reformation witnessed an effort to further classical learning for the sake of what Johannes Sturm called ‘wise and eloquent piety’ (‘sapiens et eloquens pietas’). Pagan wisdom was regarded as ‘a harbinger of rather than a challenge to Christian morality’.¹⁷ Classical education flourished in the Lutheran territories of the Holy Roman Empire, even if the ambitious goals of the reformers at moral reform of the population through education were never met.¹⁸ The subject of this study is a civic school in a staunchly Lutheran town, a mid-level sort of school well capable of preparing pupils for university yet not nearly as well staffed or funded as a Jesuit academy or the increasing number of elite schools funded directly by territorial government. Evangelical ideas reached Zwickau, situated in the electorate of Saxony, almost as soon as they were formulated in Wittenberg, and were enthusiastically received at the school. In fact, the first Lutheran school ordinance was devised here.¹⁹ In an educational market defined by oversupply, Zwickauers would, however, not relinquish the right to determine their school’s particular educational profile, neither to the Elector nor to the far-away consistory.

For schools did not exist in a social or political vacuum. Education was a highly contentious issue in this period, causing frequent tension among territorial government, consistories and local populations. Yet, after a brief flurry of trail-blazing studies in the 1960s and 1970s, the history of schools has not seen the kind of paradigm shifts that other areas of cultural and social history have in recent years. A top-down perspective still prevails, giving a voice to law-givers, consistories and pedagogical writers, not teachers, pupils, parents and local councils – thereby by and large portraying schools as vessels of educational policy rather than lively scholarly and cultural habitats. Universities, on the other hand, have been the subject of far more consistent attention over the last forty years and have been integrated into the broader political, cultural and social context of their territories and cultural exchange among them. Significantly, the rituals that took place at universities have been subjected to intense scrutiny:²⁰ matriculation ceremonies, processions and architecture have been tapped for their representational meaning,²¹ while the unofficial culture of students and professors has been integrated into the history of ranks and seniority within the culture of early modern estates.²² Rather than the knowledge produced at universities being separate from the efforts of communicating their special status and defending their privileged position, German universities, such as the particularly well-documented university of Helmstedt, have come to be treated as ‘knowledge places’ deeply entangled in the politics and social conditions of their surroundings.²³

Schools have not received this kind of attention.²⁴ As understandable as academic historians’ fascination with the development of their own habitat might be, this teleological concentration on the university skews our image of early modern scholarship. For the world of early modern learning was not limited to universities, academies or courts. Especially in the decentralised Holy Roman Empire, men in the most remote locations felt entitled to add their penny’s-worth to the scholarly discussions of the day. Pastors, schoolteachers, doctors and other men of learning from a diverse range of professions published and corresponded on a vast range of issues. More than mere amateur quackery, the participation of men from a broad range of backgrounds was an integral part of German learned culture.²⁵

Within this context, universities provided important focal points, but in many territories, schools mattered more immediately to scholars. Confession could play a part as in Habsburg-ruled Silesia, where, in the absence of a university catering to its confession, the scholarly community of the Lutheran majority focused on the Latin schools of Breslau and Liegnitz.²⁶ Schools likewise played an important cultural role in heavily urbanised territories like Württemberg or Saxony where civic self-reliance was to a large part defined by a town having its own Latin school. As evidenced by the central role of school-plays within the development of vernacular German drama, the pivotal role that schools played within the literary life of the period had an impact that could put their host towns on the map, as the playwright and schoolteacher Christian Weise did with the otherwise little-known Lusatian town of Zittau.²⁷ The same was true for occasional poetry of which schoolteachers produced a significant portion, either under their own names or, as we have seen in the opening paragraph of this book, as ghostwriters for less proficient folk. The presence of a printing press in many towns with a school contributed to spreading the cultural reputation of a school beyond the town walls, with some presses being either directly attached to the school or employing teachers as editors and proofreaders. Schools could provide scholars with an attractive alternative to a university career, so it can be little wonder that figures as prominent as the playwrights Christian Funcke and Sebastian Mitternacht or the philosopher Bartholomäus Keckermann all spent at least part of their careers at schools.²⁸ While the historiography of teaching as a profession – largely written by teachers with more than a hint of collective self-fashioning – has by and large painted a miserable picture of the status of teachers in early modern Germany, the reality was far more diverse.²⁹ The lot of teachers at rural German schools was without doubt unenviable, but teachers at well-endowed civic Latin schools could live in quite considerable comfort and enjoy the company of their town’s leading citizenry.³⁰ Councils would strive to appoint established scholars, especially to the position of rector, so that a well-endowed school could lure away prominent academics from universities, as happened for instance in the case of the mathematician Joachim Jungius, who famously left Helmstedt University to take up the rectorship of the Johanneum in Hamburg.³¹

The most influential paradigm concerning German education remains Gerald Strauss’ concept of an ‘indoctrination of the young’, in which he argued that reformers and rulers had been able to restructure (top to bottom) Lutheran schooling to suit their doctrinal purposes.³² Strauss concentrated on sixteenth-century visitation records and discovered that the university-trained visitors found much to complain about at the end of the century, yet this does not mean that things had not improved.³³ Moreover, visitation records are much less informative on civic schools than on village schools, and far less informative on Latin schools than on German schools.³⁴ The debate sparked by Strauss has not helped to explain why, as Katrin Keller has recently shown, even small Saxon communities tenaciously supported Latin schools instead of more commerce-oriented schooling until well into the eighteenth century.³⁵ Local initiative made the educational landscape in Lutheran Germany far more diverse than the period’s increasing attempts at centralisation might suggest.

Yet it is not this persistent diversity that has most interested German historians. With the exception of the studies by Töpfer and Neugebauer on the interaction of civic decision-making processes and territorial government in Electoral Saxony and Brandenburg-Prussia,³⁶ historians of education have written the story of the increasing encroachment of territorial government into matters of education as part of the narrative of the emergence of institutions of the modern ‘State’ within the superstructure of the Holy Roman Empire.³⁷ However, the relationship of the centre to the periphery, in both the administrative as well as the intellectual sense, is oversimplified from the vantage point of normative sources.³⁸ While recent synthetic accounts of education in Germany have acknowledged the differences in the way territories in the Empire administered their educational systems, they have failed to acknowledge that differences among schools could be substantial even within the same territory.³⁹ By the late fifteenth century, many cities had gained wide-ranging de facto rights of self-determination in matters of education that they were not willing to relinquish, regardless of territorial school ordinances that, in the absence of regular school visitations, were mostly toothless anyway. In fact, the ‘drive for uniformity’ Strauss diagnosed to have occurred at Lutheran Latin schools was a very superficial one indeed.⁴⁰ The development of early modern curricula depended on local demands and the scholarly climate of a particular institution as much as, if not more than, on demands from above.

This link between the structures and institutions that supported education and the knowledge they produced and digested is essentially unexplored in current writing on the early modern German school.⁴¹ In this respect, Ian Green’s recent study of English pre-university education is suggestive in that, by examining pedagogical literature alongside school curricula and biographies of teaching staff, the author is able to come to wide-ranging conclusions concerning the interplay of humanism and Protestant ideology between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The investigation of the role of schools within early modern scholarship is especially prescient since between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century such significant innovations in the field of education supposedly took place that for many, these years witnessed the birth of modern pedagogy, primarily on the territory of the Holy Roman Empire. The concentration on the works of the last bishop of the Bohemian brethren, philosopher and pedagogical theorist Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius) has, however, obscured almost completely the work of other pedagogical writers, the German theorists Wolfgang Ratke (Ratichius) and Erhard Weigel receiving the occasional mention.⁴² This dearth of research on the pedagogy that was actually practised at schools makes it impossible to gauge the context in which the pedagogical reforms of the seventeenth century were conceived or the effect they in turn had on teaching.⁴³ By contrast, Robert Black’s recent study of schools in Renaissance Florence can serve as an example of a case study that merges an in-depth analysis of curricula with an examination of the social context and thereby approaches a question (‘Why the Florentine Renaissance?’) far beyond the traditional confines of the history of education.⁴⁴

Another aspect crucial in integrating schools into the history of early modern urban culture on the one hand and the history of scholarship on the other is the history of transgressive behaviour at schools. Recent work has identified codified behaviour as essential in distinguishing men of learning from their unlearned contemporaries. Within this context, students’ transgressive behaviour, such as ritualised drinking, sword-carrying and duelling, has come under scrutiny by historians both of academic culture and of urban masculinities. Increasingly, student violence has come to be seen not as an extension of a violent, hormone-fuelled youth culture, but as a ritualised underscoring of students’ special corporative status within a society of orders.⁴⁵ That schools were similarly violent places had already been pointed out by Philippe Ariès in his classic Centuries of Childhood of 1960.⁴⁶ Both Keith Thomas’